It’s 8 a.m. Sunday. You’ve had breakfast. You look out the window and see him – silent, across the street, staring. Unsettling, but legal.

You load the family into the car for groceries. At the first intersection, there he is again. A camera flashes. Another photo of you, your kids, your license plate.

At the store, he’s there too. Permanent. Unblinking. Your trip is logged, uploaded, stored. Every intersection, every parking lot, every overpass – he and thousands like him are waiting. Watching.

This isn’t fiction; it’s Friday. It’s Flock Safety.

It’s the Big Brother we used to be afraid of, powered by AI. Invested in by Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.

Automated license plate readers now line roads in Sioux Falls, Rapid City, and more South Dakota towns. They photograph every vehicle, time-stamp it, store it for 30 days on company servers, and thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide can search the data. No warrant required. No crime required. Just a few cameras for now, proportionally, with more to come in the future.

If you’re not a criminal, what’s to hide? As Edward Snowden put it: “Saying you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”

The Constitution’s authors required warrants based on individual suspicion and probable cause. Government needed a reason to search you without going through those steps. Flock reverses the logic: do the searching first and provide the reasoning later. The government decides to track everyone with Flock, just in case, turning the Fourth Amendment inside out. 

South Dakotans have rejected this logic before. We don’t have toll roads. We banned red-light cameras. We still brand cattle, not citizens. The idea that driving to church puts you in a database would have appalled the homesteaders who wrote our state constitution.

Flock claims it solves crime. But in Kansas City a few years ago where Flock is more dominant, less than 1% of license plate reads led to an arrest. Most “hits” are for minor infractions, expired tags, or cars tied to someone who missed court. You become a suspect because the car you borrowed once had a ticket. 

In Wichita, Kansas, police used Flock to track vehicles near a George Floyd protest. In Texas, an officer queried the system to stalk his ex-wife. In Illinois, departments admit they search Flock data for “community intelligence”- who’s going to which church, union meeting, or gun shop. Flock was built to help Red Flag Laws.

Your city council can’t FOIA Flock’s server. Your sheriff can’t tell a federal agency using a FISA warrant not to look at Box Elder’s cameras. Once the data exists, it will be used. Data breaches, divorce cases, political targeting – all become possible. The Government doesn’t give back anything it takes.

Some of South Dakota’s small departments lack cyber oversight. One bad actor, one hacked password, and every plate in your town is exposed. Domestic violence survivors have left the state over less.

A single Flock camera costs 3,000 per year. Ten cameras run 30,000 annually. That’s a big part of smaller department budgets. That’s new radios. That’s streetlights in the part of town where crime actually happens.

Cameras don’t prevent crime as much as they document it. The catching-criminals argument only makes sense if Flock is on every street sign- which is the real dream the Oligarchy would like to see; and its not about crime in the first place.

Flock sells a “free trial” to city councils. That’s how it gets in. Once installed, it’s politically hard to remove. You’ll be told you’re “soft on crime” for voting no. But real safety comes from neighbors who care about each other, not from a solar panel that emails the cloud about where your Auntie gets her groceries.

The “free trial” we’re actually getting isn’t one on keeping our communities safer. It’s a “free trial” of Step 1 of the Authoritarian Handbook. Mass Surveillance. We won’t like Step 2.

So what should we do?

First, city councils everywhere should pass ordinances banning automated license plate readers on public right-of-way without a warrant tied to a felony. If police need your travel history, let them ask a judge. The only thing more dangerous than potential criminals being monitored for potential crimes is current police monitoring everyone all the time.

Second, the Legislature should require that any ALPR data be deleted in 24 hours unless part of an active investigation, ban out-of-state sharing, and mandate annual audits with criminal penalties for misuse. That’s if we can’t bully politicians into flat-out stopping mass surveillance of civilians.

Third, fund people, not cameras. Put those dollars into a school resource officer or a victim advocate. Hire another deputy or fix some street lights.

South Dakotans are not anti-police. We’re anti-unconstitutional dragnetting. We back our sheriffs when they knock on doors with a warrant. We don’t back the silent man who photographs our kids at every intersection.

We need to always draw lines between “safety” and liberty. Benjamin Franklin said that if we choose safety over liberty, we’ll have none and deserve neither.

In South Dakota, we need to watch our neighbors’ backs, not their license plates. Keep Flock out.

EDITORS NOTE: The City of Box Elder does not have Flock cameras and has not purchased any.

Collin Duprel is a guest columnist for the Rapid City Post. Opinions expressed may not necessarily represent the views of the Rapid City Post, its affiliates, or advertisers.